After The Gold Rush: Neil Young's Pono Beat Its Funding Goals. Now Comes The Hard Part.

Neil Young has the right idea, the right technology, and now the right money to theoretically save the music industry. But is it past the point of saving?

Neil Young wants to change the way we listen to music, and, based on the amount of money he's raised, we're more than ready. With Pono, Young's forthcoming, awkwardly-prism-shaped digital audio player, listeners receive up to 30 times the musical quality of a standard MP3, via what is known as a FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). FLAC has long been the denizen of jam band tapers, but, until now, it has yet to gain a mainstream foothold.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Between his Kickstarter campaign to launch the device, which was the fourth most-funded of all time, and a new Crowdfunder, which is already at $6.2 million, Young and Pono have raised $12 million, many times over the $4.8 million they were originally looking for. Slated to launch later this year, with a library of some two million titles (admittedly a fraction of iTunes' 26 million), Pono's vaunted high-def audio has garnered some criticism—mostly that it was offering more quality than we even needed. In fact, human ears can only decipher up to 44.1 kilohertz, while FLAC delivers 192 kHz.

Young, himself, had this to say about his quest for superior digital audio:

To quote one of Young's songs: "Love lost, such a cost / Give me things that don't get lost."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

That doesn't mean Pono doesn't sound incredible. We sampled the player when we interviewed Young about the device last spring, and, while we can't speak to the technical points, it was absolutely better than an iPod.

Then again, lstening to Harvest while the man, himself, is staring you down, certainly heightened the experience.

But will the rest of the music-buying public go for it when Neil is out of the room?